Although the breaker boys often symbolized all that was wrong with child labor, at least from the reformers point of view, the boys did not necessarily see themselves as victims. Many took pride in the fact that they were helping out at home – they could see for themselves that parents needed money for rent, medical bills, food, clothing, and whatever else it took to survive. One former breaker boy put it this way: “Many a time I cried with pain [from picking slate], but yet when the whistle blew for quitting time in the evening, I was as happy as a king to know I had finished another day and added another quarter to my pay to help support my family.”

Another recalled how he took for granted that ten year olds went to work: “It was a disgrace to go to school. Only sissies went to school. All the regular fellows got jobs in the breaker picking slate or in the mines nippin’ [tending door]. Even the parents took this attitude toward schooling. The boy who worked was their favorite.”

Despite the danger and the monotony of the work, breaker boys managed to carve out their own space on the job: “The boys made an alphabet with their fingers,” a former breaker boy explained. “They had a sign for every letter and they would make words. They were experts at it. Their fingers would fly, telling all their friends about the dances and everything they were doing.”

Breaker boys also knew how to get their way, if they needed to: “Once, when the bosses insisted on us working, some of the boys sneaked in [the breaker] at six-thirty in the morning on circus day and cut the main belt. When the boss tried to start the machinery up, it would not turn. There was nothing for us to do but go home for the day” – and go to the circus!

Ultimately breaker boys lost their place in the mines by the 1920s – thanks to compulsory education laws (that the labor movement pushed for), a national campaign against child labor in dangerous workplaces (that the National Child Labor Committee coordinated) and last, but not least, technological changes: Machines that broke, sorted, and purified coal without the added bother of children.